In New York 450 were meant to be available, and 50 were meant to be available in London, which totals 500, so 250 are 'missing'. I was at the London signing and I think they actually had about 200 bookplates which leaves 50 for publicity purposes (competitions, etc.).

This should give a more accurate idea of the rarity of these editions, if people agree with these numbers.

In London you could buy both the Deluxe and Ordinary Edition with bookplates in them, was this the same in New York? If so I am suprised that no bookplate Deluxe Editions have yet appeared on Ebay. Also in London, Alan Lee was in most cases (though not in all) signing on the title page and not the bookplate, so Christopher's signature is right at the top of the bookplate, he lelf space for Alan to sign as in the New York bookplates.

I have seen a lot of confirmation on the 450 number for New York. They were all in trade copies, none in deluxe copies that I have heard of. Those deluxe copies in the UK are going to be quite scarce I think!

So far, about 15 copies have sold of the US trade edition on eBay through Buy-It-Now (BIN). One lucky soul beat me out to the $55 copy, a few went for about $125-150, and they have sold for as high as $350. There are about a dozen online right now with no BIN that have bids around $60 or so - I expect those will rise before the auctions end.

There is a steady stream onto eBay, so expect a lot more copies, and a lot of fluctuation in price (up or down). Let me know if anyone sees UK copies (trade or deluxe) hit eBay!

At the UK event when you first went in, they had mainly trade copies with bookplates and a few Deluxe copies. They also had numerous copies of book volumes without bookplates and a supply of bookplates. So if you asked for a Deluxe version with a bookplate, they would put one in there and then.

This means that is pretty much impossible to say exactly how many of each exist. They had a lot of bookplates, and I think my guess of about 200 is probably pretty close. The first set of people into the store, such as myself, all bought 1 Deluxe and 1 Trade edition with bookplates, they stopped this after about the 15 person and just said that they could buy one copy only. I suspect that the later people in the queue only bought the trade version, because of the difference in price (£11.99 for Trade, £60 for Deluxe on the day).

The Trade copy on Ebay was bought by a family in front of me, who bought at least 5 copies of the Deluxe Version and 5 of the Trade (so I expect they have a few more copies to put on Ebay).